Precise measurements of rooms in a home or other building are important for a wide range of construction, repair, and remodeling projects. In many cases, the exact dimensions of a room are unknown and blue prints or other architectural drawings are unavailable for use during the project. Instead, measurements for the room are obtained using, for example, a tape measure or commercially available laser range finders. For larger rooms and rooms with irregular shapes, a precise measurement of the dimensions for the room often requires two or more people to hold the tape measure. While laser range finders simplify the process of measuring dimensions of walls and other fixtures in a room, each measurement from the laser range finder only corresponds to a single dimension between two locations in the room. Additional manual or computer processing is still required to generate a full two-dimensional or three-dimensional model of the room from the individual measurements of a tape measure, laser range finder, or other measuring device.
In some commercial projects, laser detection and ranging (LIDAR) devices are used to generate detailed scans of a room from a fixed location using one or more lasers that scan the room in an automated manner. The expense and complexity of such systems, however, often preclude their use in smaller construction projects and “do it yourself” remodeling and construction projects. With the growing popularity of smartphones, tablets, and other computing devices that include cameras, software applications have been developed that attempt to produce models of a room using multiple photographs or video of the interior of the room. While sophisticated image processing software in mobile electronic devices enables generation of an approximate floor plan of a room, models that are generated from the photographs and video often generate measurements with insufficient accuracy to be used for planning a construction project. Additionally, many construction projects need information about multiple rooms and existing measurement techniques often require line of sight measurements that are blocked by the walls separating different rooms in building. What is needed, therefore, are improvements to systems and methods for producing accurate models of a room and multiple rooms in a building in an efficient and accurate manner.